Chapter 21 Graham
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GRAHAM
I packed like a man whose house was on fire.
My mum stood in the doorway of the guest room watching me throw clothes into a bag. Jeans. Shirts. Jacket. Passport. Phone charger. I forgot my socks. I definitely forgot a belt. Checked my passport again even though I’d checked it thirty seconds ago.
“You’ll need a warmer jacket,” she said.
“It’s New York, Mum, not the Arctic.”
“You’ll need a warmer jacket,” she said again, in the tone that meant this wasn’t a suggestion. She disappeared down the hall and came back with my father’s wool coat. Dark grey, heavy, smelling faintly of peat and the cedar chest she’d kept it in for twenty years.
I looked at it. At her.
“He’d want you to have it,” she said simply. “For the journey.”
I took it. Folded it into the bag on top of everything else.
She watched me zip it shut, then crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe with the expression of a woman who’d been waiting for this moment longer than I realized.
“Go get your lass,” she said. “And Graham?”
“Aye?”
“Don’t come back without her.”
I kissed her forehead. She patted my cheek once, firm, the way she’d done since I was six years old, and then she turned and walked back to the kitchen without looking back.
I stopped in the hallway and looked at the house. Stone walls, low ceilings, the loch dark through the window. The house that had held me together when everything else was falling apart.
Then I walked out.
The British Airways lounge at Edinburgh was nearly empty at this hour. I sat in a leather chair with my carry-on at my feet and my phone in my hand and texted Dex.
Flying to New York.
His reply came in under a minute.
About bloody time.
Then, seconds later:
Don’t screw this up.
I texted Jamie next. Same message. Her response was longer.
If you somehow manage to fumble this, I will personally end your career myself. Whatever’s left of it. Which, admittedly, isn’t much.
Then:
She’s good for you, Graham. The kitchen video proved it. You’ve never been that honest in ten years of content. Whatever she did to you, don’t let it go.
I put the phone away. Boarded. Found my seat, enough room to stretch out fully, which meant I had no excuse not to sleep.
I didn’t sleep.
I replayed every word she’d said.
I loved you in the barn and I loved you when I pushed you away and I loved you every night I didn’t watch your video because I knew hearing your voice would break me open.
Seven hours in the dark. The flight attendant brought me a whisky I didn’t touch. I lay there with the window shade cracked, watching the occasional light of a ship on the Atlantic far below, and my heart doing something it hadn’t done in weeks.
Hoping.
Somewhere over Iceland, I sat up and pulled out my phone. The airline Wi-Fi was slow but functional.
I booked a hotel. Just us. Is that okay?
Her reply came in under a minute.
Yes.
Then, thirty seconds later:
Hurry up.
The hotel was a small place in the West Village. No chance of being recognized.
I got there first. Dropped my bag. Stood in the middle of the room and had absolutely no idea what to do with my hands.
The room was simple. A bed, a chair, and a window that looked out on a quiet street with trees. It smelled like clean sheets and nothing else. Neutral ground.
My phone buzzed.
I’m downstairs.
I opened the door and waited.
The elevator dinged at the end of the hall. I heard her footsteps before I saw her, quick, nervous, the rhythm of someone who was trying not to run.
Then she turned the corner.
Rose.
She looked different. Thinner than the last time I’d seen her, sharper in the face. She was wearing jeans and a jacket I didn’t recognize and her hair was down, and she stopped ten feet from the door and just looked at me.
I looked back.
Neither of us moved.
She was so beautiful it physically hurt.
Not the polished, composed beauty she wore like armor at the ranch.
Rawer. She looked like a woman who’d been through a war and was still standing, and the fact that she was standing here, in this hallway, for me, was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever witnessed.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“You forgot to shave.”
“I forgot socks, too.”
Her mouth trembled. Not quite a smile. “That’s very on-brand for you.”
“Aye.” I stepped back from the door. “Come in.”
She walked past me into the room. I closed the door and we stood there, three feet apart, the whole ocean I’d just crossed compressed into the space between us.
“I don’t know how to start,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
“I practiced on the subway. I had this whole speech, everything I wanted to say, in order, organized.” She pressed her hands together. “And now you’re here and I can’t remember any of it.”
“Then don’t make a speech.” I sat on the edge of the bed because my legs weren’t reliable. “Just talk to me.”
She sat in the chair across from me. Pulled her knees up, looking like she’d had in Cassiopeia’s stall the night of the storm, the night she told me about her parents.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For calling you a distraction. I knew it was the cruelest word I could have chosen, and I chose it anyway because cruelty was easier than admitting I was terrified.” Her voice shook.
“And then you took that word and made a video out of it. Turned it into a confession for fifty million people. And I had to watch you burn for it.”
“Rose—”
“Let me finish.” Her eyes were bright. “I made it sound rational, but it wasn’t. It was cowardice. And you deserved better.”
I leaned forward. “My turn?”
She nodded.
“I lied to you from day one. And then I lied again in that video. Different kind of lie, but still a lie.” I held her eyes. “I’m done lying to you.”
“Good.” She wiped her eyes. “Because, I’m done running from you.”
Rose uncurled from the chair. Slowly, the way she moved around nervous horses, careful, giving me time to see her coming.
She crossed the three feet between us and stood in front of me.
I looked up at her.
“I’m done being afraid,” she said.
“Me too.”
“I’m probably going to be afraid again tomorrow.”
“Then we’ll be afraid together.” I reached for her hand. She gave it. Her fingers were cold. “I’m not going anywhere, Rose. Not unless you look me in the eye and tell me to go. And even then, I’ll probably argue.”
She laughed. The most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
“Don’t go,” she whispered.
I pulled her down to me.
The kiss started gentle. Her mouth on mine, soft, careful, like she was checking that I was real. I let her. Let her take whatever she needed, my hands on her waist, thumbs tracing circles against her hips through the fabric of her shirt.
Then her fingers fisted in my shirt and pulled me closer, and the sound she made against my lips was half sob, half demand, and whatever restraint I’d been holding shattered like it had never existed.
We stood without breaking the kiss. She tasted like Rose. The specific, irreplaceable taste of her that I’d been dreaming about in my mother’s house in Scotland while the world called me a villain.
“I missed you,” I said against her mouth. “God, Rose, I missed you so much—”
“Stop talking.” Her hands were under my shirt, pulling it up, her fingers hot against my ribs. “Stop talking and touch me.”
I kissed her hard, lifting her shirt over her head in the same motion. She fumbled with my buttons, gave up, grabbed the fabric, pulled. A button pinged off the wall. Neither of us cared.
Her bra was simple, black, cotton, nothing designed to seduce, and she was the most stunning thing I’d ever seen. I kissed her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, the space between her breasts where I could feel her pulse racing against my mouth.
“Bed,” she breathed.
I walked her backward until her knees hit the mattress. She sat, then pulled me down on top of her, and the full-body contact, skin against skin, her legs wrapping around my hips, punched a groan out of me.
This wasn’t the slow exploration of a first time. This was reunion. Six weeks of silence and distance and aching compressed into hands and mouths and the desperate need to prove that the other person was still here, still solid, still yours.
“Jeans,” she said. “Off. Now.”
I unzipped hers. She kicked them free. I stripped mine and she pulled me back before I’d even gotten them past my ankles, impatient, greedy, her hands everywhere.
I kissed a path down her body, throat, chest, the soft skin of her inner thigh, taking my time because I needed to relearn her. She made a frustrated sound and tried to pull me back up.
“Graham—”
“I’m memorizing you,” I said against her hip. “Give me a minute.”
“I’ll give you thirty seconds.”
I used them well.
When my mouth found her, she gasped, then moaned, then said my name in a way that made every lonely night in Scotland worth it.
I worked her slowly, deliberately, reading every sound, every shift of her hips, every sharp intake of breath.
She was louder than the first time, less controlled, like whatever filter she’d been running for six weeks was gone and everything came out unguarded.
I brought her to the edge twice before I let her fall. When she came, her back bowed off the mattress and her hand fisted in the sheets and she said my name like it was the only word she had left.
I kissed her through the aftershocks, then moved back up her body. She was trembling, flushed, her eyes glassy.
“Condom,” she murmured. “Please tell me you have one.”
“Bag. Side pocket.”
“Of course you packed condoms and forgot socks.”
“Priorities.”
She laughed, breathless, giddy, and I rolled off to dig through my bag. Found it. Tore the wrapper. Her hand covered mine.
“Let me,” she said.
She rolled it on slowly, deliberately, eyes on mine, her touch firm and sure. I stopped breathing.
Then I was inside her, and the world went very quiet.